How do I get an external hard drive working with my Win 2000 work laptop and go back to successfully doing my job? I don't have admin privileges and won't be getting them, but basically need this drive to keep working.
Some background:
I work at home. I perform data analysis and often need to pull large files (gigs worth of data) from the company's main server to my company-provided laptop. I need to store them locally while I work on them.
Due to the current financial market, yadda-yadda-yadda, my company does not invest in technology. This was obvious from the beginning (we run Windows 2000). Now, I'm beginning to find myself unable to do as much work as I could be doing, simply because my drive isn't large enough to house all the data.
The company will not be giving me any additional local storage. IT constantly harasses me when I store data on the network drives. So, I went to my soon-to-be-defunct Circuit City and bought a 500 GB usb external drive. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. It won't run without installing a driver and I can't install the driver because I don't have admin privileges to do it. I found this
previous thread on a similar topic, but methods described there didn't work for me.
I know whether I should be trying this hard is debatable, since my employer doesn't seem to care, but let's put that aside. How do I get it working?
Straight up, I don't recommend keeping company data on storage that you bought yourself, especially if it could be considered confidential. If you agreed to an acceptable use policy, this is probably not cool. Also, if your IT people are that strange combination of inept and hyper vigilant that I think they are, this will definitely rub them the wrong way.
The best thing to do here is to ask them to install the driver for you (which implies they are okay with you using an external you own) or to make a business case for why you need a better laptop.
posted by tracert at 4:57 PM on March 1, 2009